Green ArchiTEXT

How Five Major Cities Are Boldly Tackling Climate Change

From rising sea levels to so-called heat islands, the challenges facing the world’s major cities as a result of climate change are daunting to say the least. But some municipal responses – especially those spearheaded by architects and designers – have been as creative as the problems are formidable. Think city parks turned reservoirs, urban forests on demand, even a redirected river. What follows are a few of the initiatives that five threatened yet ambitious metropolises have effected or are exploring to engender civic resilience, with designers leading the charge. READ MORE>>

via Azure Magazine

The Life Cycles Of Cities

Town Square: San Diego - How Gensler is Reimagining Cities

By Patrick Mikusky and Ben Regnier

Image © San Diego History Center

Despite the sprawling nature of San Diego, our team chose to concentrate on the downtown core, not only because it is our own backyard, but because this region of the city has consistently lacked compelling public space. Combining historical research with a survey of the current urban landscape and its dynamics, we have started to unravel the “why” of our contemporary city, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. The historic and current drivers of the San Diego economy – the military, research and engineering, tourism, tuna fishing, and shipping – have over the years worked against the development of the downtown waterfront as a civic arena. READ MORE >>

via www.gensleron.com

Gensler's CAPACITY Imagines a More Sustainable Future for LA's Infrastructure (VIDEO)

CAPACITY, the Gensler Los Angeles led academic studio at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, was created with the intent to survey, understand and visualize the dynamic set of infrastructure constraints impacting and contributing to Downtown Los Angeles’ capacity to evolve. The video above highlights the documentation and synthesizing done by the SLO_GenLA ’13 Professional studio which shows the capacity of Los Angeles’ infrastructure and demonstrates how the limits of each system may physically impact the future built form of the city.

The science of cities: Life in the concrete jungle (via Nature)

By Courtney Humphries

Nathan Phillips steps out onto the roof of Boston's Prudential Tower and looks down at the city 50 stories below. Up here, the rush of the wind has replaced the cacophony of car horns, screeching brakes and conversations filling the streets. And the rarefied air carries none of the odours that wrinkle an urban nose. The roof is “essentially a different atmospheric environment from the rest of the city”, says Phillips, an ecologist at Boston University in Massachusetts.

That rarefied air is what brings Phillips to the top of the tower. He has set up four book-sized collectors, one at each corner of the roof, to capture air blowing across the city. Black tubing carries the air samples to a tank inside the building, where a computer analyses their levels of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane and water vapour.

Like most cities, Boston brews up a blend of gases that covers the urban area like a dome. The top of the Prudential Tower is inside or outside this metropolitan atmosphere, depending on the weather. From his rooftop eyrie, Phillips looks towards three other sampling sites around the city and another some 70 miles west, in the green hills outside the pollution zone.

Phillips and his colleagues are using data from these sites to model how carbon dioxide and other gases move through the city, and how the mix differs from the air in rural areas. The work is part of an interdisciplinary project to study Boston's 'metabolism' — how elements are exchanged between natural and human systems. Phillips and his team are now focusing on atmospheric carbon — particularly carbon dioxide and methane. Next, they plan to look at carbon in the city's soils and water, and to track the flow of water, nitrogen and pollutants. “The goal is to understand the function of a major city,” Phillips says. READ MORE >>

via www.nature.com

"I'm a City Changer" Campaign Explores Inspirational Ideas to Improve Life in Cities

UN Habitat's worldwide I'm a City Changer campaign works to create awareness among citizens on urban issues to achieve better cities: 159 inspirational ideas and counting - from Nairobi to São Paulo, Geneva to Cincinnati.

Legible Cities: Tapping Big Data to Read the 'Big Picture' of a City

Thanks to Dawn Taylor of AIA KC for pointing me to this great concept on Legible Cities!

If information is the currency of the world, then many cities have under-leveraged assets buried deep in their data on urban conditions and city operations. The promise of releasing this big data to the people is a new approach to understanding cities by making them more legible. Now it is difficult, if not impossible, for someone trying to read the “big picture” of a city. Legible Cities ties together data, outdoor displays, sensors, wireless networks, data visualization and ways of accessing information to make cities more navigable, legible, and livable for its inhabitants. Legible Cities mediates physical and virtual space through installations, digital signage, mobile apps and online and off line programs.

In Legible Cities time is used to measure and report the “now”, for events, locations, communications and services that range from real-time bus schedules to virtual land use planning and more. Providing an historical lens into the city’s past will inform the present into the future. This is a revolution in measurement. “…There are now countless digital sensors worldwide in industrial equipment, automobiles, electrical meters and shipping crates. They can measure and communicate location, movement, vibration, temperature, humidity, even chemical changes in the air.” READ MORE >>

via unifiedfield.com

The Collaborative City: Creating Adelaide’s Integrated Design Strategy

By Tim Horton

In an Australian first, Adelaide has decided to plan its future by working together across boundaries. No other capital city has drawn together its councils, the state government and the Australian government to work jointly. And no other capital city has found a way to involve 74 organisations like community groups and professional peak bodies. And no other has chosen to take a people-first, design-first approach.

This is what makes the Integrated Design Strategy special. It uses a design-based approach to explore issues that often get locked in win/lose arguments. But by harnessing designs capacity to ‘synthesise’ competing interests we’re developing a more inclusive and - compared to traditional planning approaches - innovative roadmap for our collective future. READ MORE >>

via www.adelaidereview.com.au

MESH Cities New App Plots Smart Technologies Everywhere

MESH Cities just launched its new map app (for iPhones (and iPads), allowing urban users to share their smart technology findings (zip cars, wireless, open source, etc.) that define the cities of the future.

MESH Cities' mission is to help distribute the methods and technologies that will shape the design of tomorrow's responsive, sustainable cities.

"Past Futures, Present, Futures": Reimagining New York City

Exhibition: October 6, 2012 - November 24, 2012
Past Futures Opening: October 5, 7pm
Present, Futures Opening: October 26, 7pm

Past Futures, Present, Futures presents 101 unrealized proposals for New York City, dating from its formation to today with 101 reenactments by invited artists, architects, writers and policy-makers to create alternative visions for the present and future of the city. With the belief that art and architecture, beyond the production of new forms of capital or building solutions, have the power to re-imagine new forms of collective aspiration, the exhibition will present a past and future historiography of novel ideas in New York to open discussion about relevant actions in the city, their vectors of desire, methodologies, limits, audiences and agents. READ MORE >>

via storefrontnews.org